The estimate app that bills what you quoted

What an estimate is, and what it is not

An estimate is a price before the work, and it asks for nothing. An invoice is a demand for payment after it, with a due date on it. Same client, often the same lines, and two entirely different documents.

The difference is what each one asks of the person reading it. One asks a question and waits for an answer. The other asks for money, by a date. Everything that goes wrong between the two comes from treating them as one document that changes its mind.

Every row there is a field the app really copies when the estimate becomes the invoice. That is the argument of this whole post, so it is worth being precise about it rather than saying "everything carries across" and leaving you to find out which bits did not.

The invoice says what the estimate said

Three things go missing when a estimate is retyped as an invoice instead of converted into one, and all three change the total.

The tax rate they agreed to

Rates move, and the app's default moves with them. If you priced the job at one rate in March and bill it in September, the invoice takes the rate off the estimate rather than whatever would be suggested today. The figure the client accepted is the figure they accepted, and a document that quietly re-rates itself is a document you will be arguing about.

The charges, not just the lines

A discount, a surcharge, an amount held back. These move the total as much as the lines do, and re-entering them from memory is exactly how a total quietly stops matching the one that was accepted. They carry across with the lines because they are part of the price, not a note about it.

The terms you switched off

Absent has to mean off rather than unset. An estimate with the terms deliberately turned off becomes an invoice with them still off, instead of printing them again because a fresh document shows them by default. The same goes for the design: the invoice uses the estimate's template and accent color, so what arrives looks like the thing they already said yes to.

Bill something the client never agreed to and the argument is no longer about money. It is about whether you can be trusted with the next job.

Nobody gets billed twice

Converting the same won job twice raises a second invoice for work that was only done once. That is the failure that costs you the client rather than the invoice, so the estimate records which invoice it became, and the second attempt is refused by number.

It refuses three ways, and it says which of the three it was: the estimate has gone, there is nothing on it left to bill, or it has already become an invoice. A refusal that does not say why is a refusal you work around by pressing the button again.

Converting is not unusual. Joist and Jobber both turn an accepted estimate into an invoice on their cheapest paid plan, and the comparison pages set out what each of them charges and caps, with the date it was read.

Pending, accepted, or lost on price

Estimates carry a status of their own, because the question they ask has three answers and only one of them turns into money. What is still out, what came back, and what went elsewhere are three different piles, and treating them as one is how a quiet month sneaks up on you.

The reports count them separately from the invoices: so many accepted, so many pending, so many declined, over whatever stretch of the year you ask about. Two of those numbers are about the work you did. The third is about the work you did not win, which is the more useful one and the one nobody keeps.

Asked before the first one